When she saw him, she broke into a run. He did not know what it was between them that made the shortest separation seem like a ten-year stretch at Alcatraz. Whatever it was, they had it. She came into his arms, and he kissed her soundly, and he wouldn’t have given a damn if Twentieth Century Fox had been filming the entire sequence for a film titled The Mating Season Jungle.
“You’re late,” he said. “Don’t apologize. You look lovely. We have to make a stop. Do you mind?”
Her eyes questioned his face.
“A tattoo parlor downtown. Guy thinks he may remember Mary Louise Proschek. We’re lucky. This is business, so I was able to check out a sedan. Means we don’t have to take the train home tonight. Some provider, your husband, huh?”
Teddy grinned and squeezed his arm.
“The car’s around the corner. You look beautiful. You smell nice, too. What’ve you got on?”
Teddy dry-washed her hands.
“Just soap and water? You’re amazing! Look how nice you can make soap smell. Honey, this won’t take more than a few minutes. I’ve got some pictures of the Proschek girl in the car, and maybe we can get a make on them from this guy. After that, we’ll eat and whatever you like. I can use a drink, can’t you?”
Teddy nodded.
“Why do people always say they can ‘use’ a drink? What, when you get right down to it, can they ‘use’ it for?” He studied her and added, “I’m too talkative tonight. I guess I’m excited. We haven’t had a night out in a long while. And you look beautiful. Don’t you get tired of my saying that?”
Teddy shook her head, and there was a curious tenderness in the movement. He had grown used to her eyes, and perhaps he missed what they were saying to him, over and over again, repeatedly. Teddy Carella didn’t need a tongue.
They walked to the car, and he opened the door for her, went around to the other side, and then started the motor. The police radio erupted into the closed sedan.
“Car Twenty-one, Car Twenty-one, Signal One. Silvermine at North Fortieth...”
“I’ll be conscientious and leave it on,” Carella said to Teddy. “Some pretty redhead may be trying to reach me.”
Teddy’s brows lowered menacingly.
“In connection with a case, of course,” he explained.
Of course, she nodded mockingly.
“God, I love you,” he said, his hand moving to her thigh. He squeezed her quickly, an almost unconscious gesture, and then he put his hand back on the wheel.
They drove steadily through the maze of city traffic. At one stoplight, a traffic cop yelled at Carella because he anticipated the changing of the light from red to green. The cop’s raingear was slick with water. Carella felt suddenly like a heel.
The windshield wipers snicked at the steady drizzle. The tires whispered against the asphalt of the city. The city was locked in against the rain. People stood in doorways, leaned out of windows. There was a gray quietness to the city, as if the rain had suspended all activity, had caused the game of life to be called off. There was a rain smell to the city, too, all the smells of the day captured in the steady canopy of water and washed clean by it. There was, too, and strange for the city, a curious sense of peace.
“I love Paris when it drizzles,” Carella said suddenly, and he did not have to explain the meaning of his words because she knew at once what he meant, she knew that he was not talking about Paris or Wichita, that he was talking about this city, his city, and that he had been born in it and into it, and that it, in turn, had been born into him.
The expensive apartment houses fell away behind them, as did the line of high-fashion stores, and the advertising agency towers, and the publishing shrines, and the gaudy brilliance of the amusement area, and the stilled emptiness of the garment district at night, and the tangled intricacy of the narrow side streets far downtown, the pushcarts filled with fruits and vegetables lining the streets, the store windows behind them, the Italian salami, and the provolone, and the pepperoni hanging in bright-red strings.
The tattoo parlor nestled in a side street on the fringe of Chinatown, straddled by a bar and a Laundromat. The combination of the three was somewhat absurd, ranging from the exotica of tattooing into the nether world of intoxication and from there to the plebeian task of laundering clothes. The neighborhood had seen its days of glory, perhaps, but they were all behind it. Far behind it. Like an old man with cancer, the neighborhood patiently and painfully awaited the end — and the end was the inevitable city housing project. And, in the meantime, nobody bothered to change the soiled bedclothes. Why bother when something was going to die anyway?
The man who ran the tattoo parlor was Chinese. The name on the plate glass window was Charlie Chen.
“Everybody call me Charlie Chan,” he explained. “Big detective, Charlie Chan. But me Chen, Chen. You know Charlie Chan, Detective?”
“Yes,” Carella said, smiling.
“Big detective,” Chen said. “Got stupid sons.” Chen laughed. “Me got stupid sons, too, but me no detective.” He was a round, fat man, and everything he owned shook when he laughed. He had a small mustache on his upper lip, and he had thick fingers, and there was an oval jade ring on the forefinger of his left hand. “You detective, huh?” he asked.
“Yes,” Carella said.
“This lady police lady?” Chen asked.
“No. This lady’s my wife.”
“Oh. Very good. Very good,” Chen said. “Very pretty. She wants tattoo, maybe? Do nice butterfly for her on shoulder. Very good for strapless gowns. Very pretty. Very decorative.”
Teddy shook her head, smiling.
“Very pretty lady. You very lucky detective,” Chen said. He turned to Teddy. “Nice yellow butterfly, maybe? Very pretty?” He opened his eyes seductively. “Everybody say very pretty.”
Teddy shook her head again.
“Maybe you like red better? Red your color, maybe? Nice red butterfly?”
Teddy could not keep herself from smiling. She kept shaking her head and smiling, feeling very much a part of her husband’s work, happy that he’d had to make the call and happy that he’d taken her with him. It was curious, she supposed, but she did not know him as a cop. His function as a cop was something almost completely alien to her, even though he talked about his work. She knew that he dealt with crime, and the perpetrators of crime, and she often wondered what kind of man he was when he was on the job. Heartless? She could not imagine that in her man. Cruel? No. Hard? Tough? Perhaps.
“About this girl,” Carella said to Chen. “When did she come in for the tattoo?”
“Oh, long time ago,” Chen said. “Maybe five months, maybe six. Nice lady. Not so pretty like your lady, but very nice.”
“Was she alone?”
“No. She with tall man.” Chen scrutinized Carella’s face. “Prettier than you, Detective.”
Carella grinned. “What did he look like?”
“Tall. Movie star. Very handsome. Muscles.”
“What color was his hair?”
“Yellow,” Chen said.
“His eyes?”
Chen shrugged.
“Anything you remember about him?”
“He smile all the time,” Chen said. “Big white teeth. Very pretty teeth. Very handsome man. Movie star.”
“Tell me what happened?”
“They come in together. She hold his arm. She look at him, stars in her eyes.” Chen paused. “Like your lady. But not so pretty.”
“Were they married?”
Chen shrugged.
“Did you see an engagement ring or a wedding band on her finger?”
“I don’t see,” Chen said. He grinned at Teddy. Teddy grinned back. “You like black butterfly? Pretty black wings? Come, I show you.” He led them into the shop. A beaded curtain led to the back room. The walls of the shop were covered with tattoo designs. A calendar with a nude girl on it hung on the wall near the beaded curtain. Someone had jokingly inked tattoos onto her entire body. The tattooer had drawn a pair of clutching hands on the girl’s full breasts. Chen pointed to a butterfly design on one of the walls.